The Barcelona winger placed third in the Ballon d'Or, but won best young player for the record third time in a row – and wore a very fun watch to match

Lamine Yamal arrived at the Ballon d'Or gala wearing a Richard Mille RM 67-01 in rose gold with a pink rubber strap – a combination that only a 19-year-old who has already won almost everything can pull off. On the podium that night, each wrist told a different story. Harry Kane, the winner, chose a Rolex Daytona with blue sapphires and obsidian worth £1m, one of the most coveted timepieces of the moment. Kylian Mbappé, who finished second, opted for a retro-inspired Hublot in yellow gold. Yamal, who came in third, went for pink.

On Monday, at the London Palladium, he received his third consecutive Kopa Trophy from Andriy Shevchenko and became the first soccer player to win the award for best player under 21 three times. Before him, no one had even managed to win it twice. His season speaks for itself: La Liga champion with Barcelona, the league’s top assist provider and best player, with 24 goals and 17 assists in 45 games, and World Cup champion with Spain, scoring one goal in the tournament and drawing a penalty in the semifinal against France. As he took the stage, he mentioned Pau Cubarsí, his teammate and rival for the award, and said he would have liked to see him win. A 19-year-old giving others the spotlight on the night of his record-breaking achievement: that, too, is part of who he is.

The three watches on the podium serve almost as a portrait of their owners. Kane’s Daytona is the culmination of a career built on patience—fine jewelry set on the most recognizable chronograph in history. Mbappé’s Hublot is a tribute, a nod to the original 1980 model. Yamal’s Richard Mille looks in the opposite direction: it’s the youngest of the three, the most technical in appearance, and the only one that seems designed by someone who grew up with a video game console in their hands.

This watch deserves a chapter of its own. Richard Mille unveiled the RM 67-01 Automatic Extra Flat in 2016, as a response to those who thought the brand only knew how to build monumental watches. The first model came in titanium with a white strap; the rose gold version followed, once the brand realized that a slim watch could also be a dress watch. It retains the tonneau case – that barrel-shaped silhouette that has defined the brand since its very first model – measuring 38.7 by 47.52 mm and just 7.75 mm thick: when it was launched, no Richard Mille had ever been so slim. The skeletonized dial reveals the movement’s three-dimensional architecture, with bridges and the mainplate staggered at different heights, so that the watch looks almost like an engineering model. In this version, the 18-karat rose gold case and the pink rubber strap form a monochromatic ensemble that on another wrist would seem like a whim, but on Yamal's looks like the most natural thing in the world.

Pink, by the way, is no minor choice. For decades, men’s luxury revolved around steel, yellow gold, and black, and any deviation was seen as eccentricity. A generation of soccer players, musicians, and athletes has broken that rule without asking permission, and Yamal belongs to that generation: he dresses the way he plays, without fear of anyone telling him that’s not how it’s done.

Inside, the CRMA6 caliber—an automatic movement developed in-house by the brand—ticks away at just 3.6 mm thick. It features a titanium mainplate, a platinum rotor, a date display, a function indicator showing whether the crown is in winding or setting mode, and a power reserve of about 50 hours. The choice of platinum makes sense: it’s a metal so dense that it allows for a slim rotor capable of winding the watch without adding bulk to the case. On the secondary market, the rose gold version sells for around £200,000.

This isn’t the first time Yamal has relied on this model. After the World Cup, upon his return to the national team’s training camp, he was already spotted wearing another gold RM 67-01. A year ago, at the gala in Paris, he had opted for a much more classic style: a rose gold Patek Philippe Cubitus. Of all the watches he could choose from, he keeps coming back to the same one, and that loyalty speaks volumes about someone who, on the field, doesn’t usually change his mind about which way he’s going to go.

Almost everything, we said. He’s missing the Ballon d’Or, and the history of the award he’s just won three times suggests it’s best not to get impatient: no Kopa Trophy winner has yet claimed France Football’s top prize. The first on that list was Kylian Mbappé himself, in 2018, and tonight—eight years later—he came within a hair’s breadth of it. Harry Kane, who took home the award in his hometown, had to wait until he was 33 and had the best season of his life to step onto that stage. Yamal is 19, with three Kopa Trophies in his trophy case, a World Cup title, a La Liga title, and a 7.75-millimeter watch that counts the seconds unhurriedly, with 50 hours to spare. Working in his favor is the one thing no Richard Mille can buy, not even one made of rose gold: time.